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An indispensable volume of poems, selected from almost four decades of work, that tracks the evolution of one of our most renowned contemporary poets, Pulitzer Prize-winner Jorie Graham.

The Poetry Foundation has named Jorie Graham “one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation.” In 1996, her volume of poetry selected from her first five books, Dream of a Unified Field, won the Pulitzer Prize. Now, twenty years later, Graham returns with a new selection, this time from eleven volumes, including previously unpublished work, which, in its breathtaking overview, illuminates of the development of her remarkable poetry thus far.

In From the New World—Poems 1976-2014, we can witness the unfolding of Graham’s signature ethical and eco-political concerns, as well as her deft exploration of mythology, history, love and, increasingly, love of the world in a time of crisis. As the work evolves, the depth of compassion grows—gradually transforming, widening and expanding her extraordinary formal resources and her inimitable style.

These pages present a brilliant portrait one of the major voices of American contemporary poetry. As critic Calvin Bedient says, “If Graham has proved oversized as a poet in the field of contemporary poetry, it is because she continually recalls the great Western tradition of philosophical and religious inquiry . . . tenaciously thinking and feeling her way through layer after layer of perception, like no poet before her.”

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Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.

Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Place (2012), Sea Change (2008), Overlord (2005), Never (2002), Swarm (2001), The Errancy (1997), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

She has taught at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003.